Olympic gold medalist Lilly King opened up about her life post-Rio this week in an interview that appeared in the IndyStar. This comes just one week before King is set to compete in U.S. National Championships Indianapolis where she will be the favorite to qualify for World Championships in her specialty breaststroke events.
King memorably won gold in the 100 breaststroke at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games over Russian Yulia Efimova after publicly stating she didn’t believe someone with the doping violation Efimova had should be allowed to compete.
Efimova was one of several Russian athletes caught in a doping controversy related to Meldonium last summer that threatened her eligibility to participate in the Olympics. Efimova was ultimately cleared to compete just days before she was scheduled to dive in for her first event in Rio.
While King left Rio as an Olympic gold medalist, she recounts in the interview her struggle with what came after. Recalling a meeting back in the fall of 2016, Indiana University coach Ray Looze recounted how a chat about poor grades quickly opened the floodgates. “She started talking, and it all came out,” he said.
King was struggling in school, but she was also struggling with her new-found celebrity and a lack of motivation in the pool following her summer success. The post-Olympics let-down is common among Olympians, and it didn’t help that King’s rise to the top was sudden and her moment in the spotlight enhanced by her public comments about Efimova.
Looze says a poor performance at the Short Course World Championships helped to re-focus King, and her performance in the classroom and in the pool have improved significantly in the spring. That culminated in two new short course American records in the 100 and 200 yard breaststroke and a new goal of breaking the world records in the long course pool.
While the 20 year-old rising junior at Indiana appears to be ready to swim faster than ever, so too are her competitors. Efimova just last week set a new Russian record of 1:04.82 in the 100 breaststroke, faster than King’s winning time of 1:04.93 from the Olympic Games. Efimova is the defending world champion in the event from 2015, and the two are likely headed for another show down this summer.
Speaking on the rivalry, King welcomes it, saying “There’s no point in having a rivalry if we don’t go back and forth a little bit…This summer, I’m not going to talk about everything that happened last summer. I spoke my piece. I’ve said everything I need to say.”
You can read the full article from the IndyStar here.
Go Lilly!
Go Lilly!
Effinova is a cheating commie just like East Germans . You rule!